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Also, even with all the perpetually shifting estimates, it really does appear to be getting closer. It's not a case of "always 50 years away": 50 years ago, it was "50 years away"; 20 years ago, it was "25 years away"; now, it's "15 years away". That is actual progress -- not as fast as we'd like, or as was once expected, but progress.

> I suspect the answer is: the "Chicago Exchanges" have nodes on the low-latency Wall Street network.

No doubt they've got the most expensive, premium, low-latency network connection money can buy; you're right that far. But did you seriously mean to suggest that money can currently buy a faster-than-light connection? That they have negative latency?

Ah, but see, the point of the article is that, unlike all the rest of us, this guy actually is smart enough to predict exactly how our 1000-times-smarter hyper-advanced post-human descendants will think.

If you RTFS, you might notice that it mentions "replicat[ing] the energy-efficient nature of jelly movement". Any task that's useful to perform in water can be done better by making the vehicle more energy-efficient. Other properties of the design will no doubt make it more suitable for some tasks than for others. That'll all shake out as the technology becomes available to designers of machines for all sorts of purposes. Adding another mode of locomotion to the toolkit available to such designers can only be useful.

You know, from the cat's point of view, it's the physicist who keeps cutting his probability of existence in half every time he performs the experiment. She might wonder why he commits this series of half-suicides. If she cared.

I graduated Spring 1998 from UC Berkeley with a BA in Computer Science, worked at Silicon Graphics for two years, then IBM for two years, and am currently at Yahoo! (Messenger server engineering). Berkeley's EECS system finally took down my web pages, and I was "between sites" for a while. I have now put them on my own system, but most of what's there is between one and three years out of date. I have added an explanation of my sig, though.